I have no idea why this is getting upvoted. A blog post that simply observes a bunch of self-serve kiosk machines, has a bait title, and is used on HN for an uninformative rehash of a UBI discussion that has taken place here over and over. I was hoping at least for a piece that made an argument or said something informative, not for some photos of a movie theater lobby and a restaurant.
The 'argument', and the admittedly more informative content, is distributed over many posts on that blog (which I like and follow).
This was a relatively sparse post compared to others from the same blog and is, in my opinion, mostly a 'look, more examples' kind of thing for the blog's regular audience. In this case, literally 'look, more examples of low-status work being squeezed out of the world'.
And, as I've pointed out in various other threads, kiosks used in the food industry is more or less the worst possible example of automation making people redundant. I mean, the first example is basically a digital version of leaving a menu with tickboxes and asking people to have change ready so it can be picked up by the food deliverers as they pass your table, which has been a possible way of cutting staff - in the few restaurants that don't think waiters encourage more purchases per customer - since mass literacy. Robotic barista? We've had coffee vending machines since the 1940s (the first vending machine was proposed in 215 b.c). And whilst the arm adds novelty value, it's still less likely to be cute or good at upselling muffins as minimum wage earners.
I wish UBI discussions on here generally revolved around actual predictions and the awkward mathematics of who's paying for it when, but I understand that it's easier to sell dubious ideas with pictures of robots than falsifiable claims
